


Elsewhere Less

by LittleRedCosette



Series: Resplendence [4]
Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Character Death, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Love, M/M, Post-Inception, Rape Aftermath
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-15
Updated: 2016-09-15
Packaged: 2018-08-15 04:21:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,252
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8042431
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LittleRedCosette/pseuds/LittleRedCosette
Summary: ‘It’s like you’ve done this before,’ she whispers into the blanket of darkness.‘Last time I was too late,’ he replies quietly, still looking at the bruises on her forearm.(In which Arthur keeps on living, and the past keeps on breathing.)





	Elsewhere Less

Twenty-five months after Kaunas, Arthur threatens to break their chemist’s kneecaps if she continues her insufferable flirting.

Ariadne remains uncharacteristically silent, and it’s for this reason alone that Arthur forgives the trembling of her shoulders as she bites back her laughter, face buried in her blueprints.

When she brazenly takes Arthur’s hand as they leave the warehouse they’ve claimed, he lets her. In fact, a small ugly part of him relishes the chemist’s resentful glower as they depart, hand in hand, comfortably close.

(He wonders quietly in the darkness of his thoughts what Eames would have done in Ariadne’s place. Not taken his hand, that’s for sure. Maybe he’d have crowded Arthur close into his desk, leaned into his ear and whispered inaccurate mathematical equations like sweet nothings.)

Ariadne follows him out of the warehouse and all the way to his hotel, so he buys her a drink and they sit in the bar until the small hours.

.

.

 _Sugar water_ , Eames spat the first time Ariadne had ordered Archer’s and lemonade, and Ariadne had laughed.

Sometimes, when he’s feeling particularly selfish, Arthur feels jealousy burning his oesophagus to think that she, too, has pieces of Eames to harbour.

.

.

‘Eames wouldn’t want you to give up on love for the rest of your life,’ Ariadne says as she stirs the lemon slice around her fifth glass.

She’s getting good at that. Blindsiding him boldly, wearing a warrior’s mask of determination.

Arthur’s sideways glance of disdain is all he needs to tell her exactly what Clara Wiseman, their neatly polished chemist, can do with her stifling affections.

‘Not _Clara_ ,’ Ariadne scoffs.

The hotel bar twinkles with glass in every colour.

Outside, New York hums and trills, sleepless.

‘But _some_ one,’ she insists with faithful determination, as wilful as the day she returned to the warehouse in Paris, four years ago. ‘Eames wouldn’t want you to be alone.’

When Arthur snorts softly, a quiet breath of laughter, it’s clear Ariadne thinks she’s won this round. She encourages him with a nudge to his elbow where it rests on the bar.

Arthur looks up from his whisky into the almond lines of her eyes. He sees something unrecognisably wondrous. He sees the face of a woman who knows love, and covets it. He sees all the reasons Jacob Herveau married her, and all the reasons Arthur never would.

He sees her deeply rooted faith, unbridled by cynicism.

‘Eames was a born narcissist,’ Arthur says, the words riding on a shaky exhale, hot over the rim of his glass.

Words this woman couldn’t dream of speaking about a friend, much less a lover. Words that roll from Arthur like fond mutterings.

‘I’m sure he’d have been thrilled to know that I was spoiled for all future interested parties.’

It doesn’t sit right. A lie. If there’s one thing that Eames did to Arthur, spoiling him wasn’t it. He corrects:

‘He’d have loved to think that he was my last and only everything.’

.

.

_Can I help you, darling?_

It seems you’re a public menace, Mr Eames.

.

.

‘Do you think that’s true?’ Ariadne pries delicately, teasing back the fine layers of skin that shroud his walls, seeking the vulnerable flesh beneath with honest fingers and wide, disbelieving eyes.

Arthur bristles at her doubt.

He can smell her perfume clinging to her hair. The white gold glint of her wedding ring is sharp against the sleek grey surface of the bar.

‘I don’t know,’ he replies truthfully.

He‘s rarely one for such introspection. _Let the dead sleep_ , he’s always believed. _They wake for no-one_.

‘He was my last something,’ he continues, pondering. ‘Falling in love again seems like a lot of effort.’

Beside him, Ariadne tenses at his offhand confession.

Something that has been unspoken until now congeals, exposed like a wet wound. She looks at him hard, figuring him out like Escher’s Waterfall.

‘Falling in love shouldn’t –’ she slips and falters, reaches blindly for words that escape her, ‘– it should be _effortless_.’

Arthur snorts, takes a gulp of whisky so that only the dregs remain. What a life this woman has led, for love to be effortless. What dreams she has known and moulded for herself like clay figurines.

Around them, the hotel customers chatter and flirt and fill their silence for them with cotton mute voices.

‘Falling in love with Eames was probably the least effortless thing I ever did,’ he admits coolly, returning her gaze with smiling eyes.

Ariadne baulks at the claim, her voice suspicious, dry.

‘You escaped the clutches of the Russian mob. Twice. You broke into Guantanamo Bay.’

‘Yes,’ Arthur nods, biting his glassy grin and ordering another Jameson’s. ‘Yes I did.’

.

.

It happens in Seville, which for some reason offends Arthur even more, as if the city itself has betrayed his trust.

Ariadne is shaken. She’s ashy skinned beneath the tears spilling over her lashes, over the gritty scrape on her cheek and the purpling bruise on her jaw.

There’s blood that doesn’t belong to her on her clothes, and Arthur is careful not to touch her clammy skin as she peels herself out of them. The stench of grime and sweat and fear lingers, and Arthur bundles the dress and tights into a creased ball without looking at them, tosses them into the trash can.

His hackles rise at the finger shaped splotches that litter her pale frame, deep imprints of unwelcome hands on her thighs, her hips, the bite of nails where they’d dragged her down to the grimy gutter.

Her screams are still ringing in his ears, still raspy in her throat. He can still see the writhing of her limbs as the tallest man had clamped a hand over her wailing mouth, slackening as Arthur buried a bullet in his skull, then the second man, then the third.

The hand forcefully wedged between her legs had fallen limp and she’d sobbed and spluttered, breathless as she’d scrambled away from her very dead captors, from her very alive saviour.

She had flinched violently at Arthur’s suggestion of the hospital.

So now they’re in her hotel room, the bathroom door swiftly shut but not locked between them.

When she emerges wearing two layers of soft clothes and her hair soaking over her shoulders, she takes the water and the tylenol he offers, and even lets herself be shepherded gently into bed where Arthur sits close by, watching silently.

He stays awake all night.

And again the following night.

When she wakes up wrought with shivers and slick with cold sweat he’s there to pull her to the surface, and he tells her that Jacob’s on his way, which is true.

She’s bleary eyed with tears, gaunt with anxiety and her nails dig painfully into Arthur’s knee.

‘It’s like you’ve done this before,’ she whispers into the blanket of darkness, and he can see the itching torment that makes her want to crawl out of her own skin. That makes him want to paint the town red with the blood of anyone who ever thought of harming Ariadne Herveau.

Her words are loaded, so heavy it’s a wonder they don’t burn her tongue. He feels the scalding of her gaze on his cheek as he inspects her sprained wrist, while she carefully probes at the walls around him, searching for a weakness in his iron defences.

‘Arthur?’ she presses, throaty and cold and wincing as if she knows everything, like a mother, which is absurd, he tells himself, but not really.

‘Last time I was too late,’ he replies quietly, still looking at the bruises on her forearm.

There’s an apology hidden in his tone. Ariadne stays silent, as if she knows it isn’t meant for her.

.

.

_I really – really hated you._

_For not being there._

_For not_

_._

_._

_I just thought you were going to find me_

_._

_._

(I’m never leaving you again. I swear. Not for anything.)

.

.

_GLORY is that bright tragic thing, that for an instant means Dominion, warms some poor name that never felt the sun, gently replacing in oblivion._

.

.

‘I will be the dreamer,’ Arthur says, quietly assured, and that is the end of the discussion.

Ariadne doesn’t say anything, not because she has nothing to say, rather, because she is distracted by the thought of her husband several thousand miles away, wheezing through two cracked ribs.

This, ultimately, proves to be her downfall.

She argues fiercely with Yusuf when he is twenty-eight seconds late responding to her check-in. She slams the door in Arthur’s face not once but twice. She demolishes two perfectly acceptable models when it gets too hard to concentrate.

She shouts at Jacob down the phone and cries because he doesn’t have the breath to shout back yet.

‘Can you do this?’ Arthur asks bluntly the night before the job.

She’s ashamed and bashful. She knows it’s only Arthur’s diamond faith in her abilities that has kept her from getting sent home already.

The fact that he’s resorted to outright asking her is nothing short of humiliating, and she nods at her shoes like a teenager.

‘Ok then,’ Arthur says, calm and trusting.

He doesn’t ask again, and Ariadne blushes, feels dry, dusty lumps in her throat.

She’s fine until she reaches the second level, a hospital ward built into the back wall of the bank where the mark might well have left a cheque for several million dollars in. The sharp stench of bleach reaches her and she gags, and it takes four seconds for the militarised projections to pounce.

There’s something in her mouth, pressing her tongue deep into her throat, and hands dragging her backwards by her hair as her legs flail and her scalp threatens to bleed right off her skull. There’s blood in her mouth and stinging tears in her eyes and she wrestles against projections – doctors, bankers, nurses, patients – as they claw at her and all she can do is hope they’re distracted enough by her to allow Arthur time to fish around elsewhere unhindered.

Then the screaming erupts.

Blood splatters the sterile hallway, none of it her own, and in the confusion she’s momentarily crushed by the body of a projection slumping over her, his throat torn open, so that his jugular showers her, hot and reeking metallic.

She spits out the cloth in her mouth, shakes the blood out of her eyes, ready to yell at Arthur for wasting valuable time, but as the last gurgling screams echo death, a hand larger and warmer than Arthur’s takes her arm to hoist her up.

‘Up you get, that’s a love,’ a gritty voice mumbles.

Ariadne flinches away, almost topples over the pile of corpses littered around them.

‘Eames,’ she chokes.

He’s covered in blood.

There’s a knife in his hand and a feral glint in his eyes.

He’s glorious and terrifying and so alive it makes Ariadne reach for him.

He backs away, cloudy eyes alight and broad shoulders tense.

‘Ah ah ah,’ he laughs, playful and dangerous. ‘Don’t be an idiot, Mrs Herveau,’ he warns. ‘You know better than that.’

Ariadne feels a lonely flickering in her chest. Her lungs are tight, her eyes wet, and she can taste blood in the back of her throat.

‘Does Arthur?’ she replies, too afraid to ask more.

She feels the phantom stab of Mallorie’s knife, the chill in her voice and the well of despair in Dominick Cobb’s rotting subconscious.

‘Of course,’ Eames replies, warm and fond.

Then Eames raises the knife, slips it so kindly into her heart it feels like a kiss goodnight.

.

.

She doesn’t tell Arthur.

.

.

She takes the redeye back to Paris, foregoes the debrief.

Arthur doesn’t call.

.

.

Jacob heals.

So does Ariadne.

.

.

_You don’t need to be militarised, Ariadne. Your subconscious has already taken the necessary precautions. Trust me._

You mean I have no control over my militarisation?

_Of course you can do if you want. But I promise it won’t be any more effective than whatever’s already there._

What about you? Did you build your militarisation?

_A little. When I first started with Cobb._

And now? Arthur?

 _Now my subconscious has it covered_.

And you trust your subconscious.

 _Completely_.

.

.

It’s a Sunday afternoon in August. As such, Arthur isn’t wearing a tie and Eames is sitting comfortably on the precipice of drunk, his feet dangling over the verge as he peers into the tempting abyss.

Arthur thumbs through a book, words a blur, and sneaks glances at Eames from the top of the page.

Eames pays him no heed. His nose a few inches from the sketchbook he’s scribbling in, he takes generous gulps of malbec every few minutes.

They sit on the balcony of Arthur’s Paris apartment, cats in the sunshine, parched and sleepy.

‘Are you happy here?’ Arthur asks.

He chokes on the words, wrestled from his mouth by a wilful tongue.

Eames looks up, fingers mucky with colour and brow damp with sweat. His equatorial tan has faded a little, but his cheeks are pink with concentration. His brow furrows, and Arthur blushes in despair, wants to hide inside his book again.

‘Are you having another existential crisis?’ Eames retorts, sounding less amused than his sudden grin suggests.

‘No,’ Arthur mumbles grumpily.

‘You’re not about to propose, are you?’

‘ _Jesus,_ Eames.’

‘Well, what do you mean?’ Eames splutters, wiping his face with a hand, leaving trails of oily blue and green on his skin.

Arthur scowls, drains Eames’ wine glass and blinks too much. ‘I just meant –’

‘I know what you meant,’ Eames interrupts, magnanimous and shy.

Arthur wants to be angry at him for his goading but he can’t bring himself to admit it.

‘So, are you?’ he presses. Leans over to mould his palm around Eames’ rounded jaw, runs his thumb over the purpling stain of red wine inside his lips, over his chin and the vulnerable throb of his adam’s apple until he feels the thick bunching of scar tissue at the junction of his throat.

He feels Eames’ shudder, the thready fear under Arthur’s touch. It’s been almost a year since Bangkok. He’s tried not to keep count of all the times Eames has locked the bathroom door behind himself.

(Forty-eight.)

Eames sighs, delicately embarrassed.

‘It’s fifty-seven degrees Celsius in Kenya right now,’ he replies. ‘I’m fed up of malbec. Do we have any chardonnay left?’

He takes Arthur’s hand, tugs it away from the scar and the fear and brings it back to his face where he is smiling.

It’s a benevolent smile, generously given. The sort of smile Eames does when he doesn’t really want to smile at all, and Arthur feels a twinge of guilt in his gut.

That smile isn’t for him. It’s a mask Arthur thought he’d obliterated years ago.

(It came back three years ago. Arthur could name the day if he dared, which he doesn’t.)

Eames must feel it, too, because without warning or ceremony he surges forwards into Arthur’s cupped palm and kisses him, his hard teeth catching his lips, tongue wet.

He tastes of heavy red wine and unmentionable things.

When they break apart, mouths open, gasping and clutching, they keep their faces close, share oxygen and sweat like dreams.

‘Are we living together?’ Arthur whispers into the scant space between their mouths.

Eames’ laughter is hot, hotter than the sun on their skin.

‘You moved into my flat in Manchester almost five years ago,’ Eames scoffs, nudges his lips against Arthur’s in an apathetic imitation of a kiss.

‘Not exactly,’ Arthur murmurs.

‘I’ve kept paint in this flat since 2007. I have more books on these shelves than you do.’

This time it’s Arthur who surges forwards. His fingers pull tightly against Eames’ scalp. Eames’ protest is meagre and brief. His fingers bruise the back of Arthur’s neck.

.

.

There are days like this.

Doubtful.

Hopeful.

In the end, it’s fifty-seven degrees Celsius in Kenya, but Eames is here, in Paris, with Arthur.

And here he stays.

.

.

The phone rings seven times in five minutes.

Arthur is in a meeting, and the phone vibrates in his blazer pocket, hot and frantic.

‘Excuse me’ he says when it rings for the eighth time. ‘I have to take this call.’

Cobb throws him a look of disgruntlement, but the client, a tall bespectacled man called Mr. Garner, nods obligingly. Mal doesn’t acknowledge him. She hasn’t looked up from her notebook in over twenty minutes.

Arthur waits until he’s out of the room before answering.

This turns out to be a good thing, because while he doesn’t recognise the number there’s no mistaking the voice that bursts through the line when he picks up.

‘ _Ar – fucking – mani can fucking do one you piece of shit! How dare you, you bastard, that must have cost a small island. I hope you’re happy. Can you hear that? It’s the sound of a hundred thousand fashion hearts breaking all over the bloody world. You bastard.’_

There’s more, but Arthur can’t hear it over the brilliance of his own self-satisfied smile. He can hear the crackling whine of Armani burning to crisp, and he can’t bring himself to care.

‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ he drawls. ‘But wasn’t it you who broke into my apartment and slept in my bed without permission?’

‘ _I washed the sheets!_ ’ Eames splutters.

Arthur can picture it all: Eames reaching his apartment in Mombasa, sweaty and flushed and stinking of airport grime, clambering the rickety stairs, falling face first onto his couch for a few hours before finally stripping himself of his two day old clothes to find row upon row of carefully selected suits. Not to mention the tie collection.

‘ _How do you know my measurements?_ ’ Eames interrupts his vividly rewarding imagination.

‘Eames, please,’ Arthur drawls.

‘ _Oh fuck me_ ,’ Eames grumbles, ‘ _Are they all tailored?_ ’

‘Of course.’

‘ _Jesus Arthur, that it one seriously expensive vengeance streak._ ’

Arthur laughs, short and proud and cool.

‘You left my fucking sheets, _wet_ , in the machine. I didn’t return to Paris for almost a month. I had to buy new ones. And a new machine,’ Arthur retorts.

(Hisses, actually, because he liked those sheets and because he lives on the top floor of a five storey building.)

‘ _Oops_ ,’ Eames snaps playfully. ‘ _What have you done with all my actual clothes?_ ’

Arthur, in the interest of his own safety, stays quiet.

(And just a little bit smug.)

‘ _Arthur, I swear to god, if you threw out my pineapple waistcoat you are going to regret being born.’_

Eames sounds awfully sinister. All growly and tingly and it makes Arthur wish he was less than a continent away. His ability to sound even slightly sinister at the mention of anything as ungodly as his pineapple waistcoat affords him Arthur’s grudging respect.

‘I promise I did not _throw out_ anything. Not even your – fruit – patterned – attire.’

(The waistcoat he’s worn twice, purely to punish Arthur. The waistcoat he bought purely for that purpose.)

There’s incoherent grumbling and rustling. Footsteps on creaking floors.

Then it comes.

The gasp of silence.

The fizzling of Eames’ rising blood pressure through the phone.

‘ _You fucking arsehole!’_

.

.

I think I’m a little bit in love with you.

.

.

I loved you.

.

.

Arthur.

.

.

Ariadne watches, because it’s in her nature and because if she hadn’t she might have been comatose before she could even finish her first job in dreamshare.

In all that time, though, she only really sees it once.

A flicker of something visceral and tightly wound, holding them together.

It’s only a test run, exploding and blinding, a new compound sent from Yusuf.

She watches over them, one eye on the timer as they dream. Flinches when Arthur bursts out of the dream in a flurry of limbs, wrenching the IV from his wrist, gagging, Eames following five seconds delayed, blind and blinking.

‘Arthur,’ he stammers, not frightened but angry, firm.

And Arthur turns, looks down at Eames, fingers clenched at his side.

‘Arthur,’ Eames repeats, sterner, less angry.

He places a hand on Arthur’s forearm, holds it tight until Arthur releases the shuddering breath in his lungs.

‘We’re not using it,’ Eames says, eyes never leaving Arthur’s white face.

Ariadne nods, quiet and cold.

‘I’ll call Yusuf,’ she says quietly, grateful for the excuse to prise herself out of her seat and shuffle out of the room.

When she glances back, they haven’t moved.

The lines of Arthur’s frame are tight, and Eames sits, fragile, a predator. Watchful, gripping Arthur’s arm.

Like an anchor.

.

.

After Mombasa, and the close call with Cobol, and Saito’s timely appearances, Cobb returns to Paris alone, and the scorching weight of a hundred suns lifts itself from Arthur’s burning shoulders at his arrival.

‘He’s flying out to Sydney, and he’s found us a chemist,’ Cobb says as he drops his jacket on the back of a reclining chair, runs his fingers over the closed silver of the PASIV.

‘Who?’ Ariadne chirps up, inquisitive (downright nosy) and defiant (downright pigheaded) under Cobb’s stare.

Arthur nods silently and returns to his laptop.

‘Eames, our forger,’ Cobb replies, sounding positively smug at the sight of her.

‘Eames?’ Ariadne repeats suspiciously. ‘What kind of a name is that?’

‘A fake one,’ Arthur replies, still looking at his laptop.

‘Well, does he have a real one?’

Arthur, who as Eames himself will attest is selectively deaf, doesn’t reply.

.

.

You don’t understand.

_Don’t I, William? Wait. Eames._

No. You don’t get to call me that.

_Why?_

William is dead. Do you understand? He is dead.

_Yes. Ok. He’s dead. I get it._

Don’t look at me like that.

.

.

‘Why Eames?’ Arthur asks, muffled from behind the scarf wrapped over his mouth three times.

The upturned collar of his coat doesn’t quite meet the tips of his ears, leaving them raw and cold. His nose feels like it might have already fallen off his face, and despite the two pairs of gloves that leave his fingers fat and awkward, his hands are still stinging.

Eames, a lion in the arctic, is wrapped in so many layers the shape of him is entirely lost. Only the thin strip across his eyes is visible, grey orbs glassy and cold staring grumpily out at the world.

Or in this instance, at the unheated cabin on the edge of Vík, cursing Iceland under his every breath.

They might die here. Arthur hopes they at least make it to the New Year.

(They probably won’t die here. After all Eames has complained, Arthur couldn’t bear to let him be right, not when it comes to their deaths.)

‘Why Arthur?’ Eames retorts after a moment of thought.

 _Facetiousness doesn’t suit you,_ Arthur wants to say, but that would be a lie.

‘Arthur was my mother’s maiden name,’ he replies honestly.

Eames doesn’t acknowledge the past tense, or even worse, reply truthfully.

( _I know_ , he should say, because he can dig with the best of them.)

‘So,’ Arthur pushes. ‘Why Eames?’

Eames, difficult to read even when he’s spelling it out word for word, may as well be the bundle of clothes he’s so perfectly imitating.

He shifts, incremental, icy. The cabin is mostly dark, but there’s light in his eyes, and Arthur feels inexplicably drawn to it, like a boat in a storm.

‘It’s what I called my sister,’ he says hesitantly. ‘When I was a child. Took me years to speak. Emmeline was a real mouthful. Jesus, I fucking hate the cold.’

.

.

Arthur doesn’t ask what happened to Emmeline.

.

.

(Five years later, they go to Cambridge to rest, to nurse their wounded bodies and bruised egos.)

(He finds her there. Tall, India marble, daffodils spilling out over dry green grass)

.

.

_Emmeline Mae Charles_

_Beloved daughter and sister_

_May she find eternal rest in His arms_

_1969 – 1993_

.

.

( _I knew she was afraid of him. But he’d helped her escape one hell, and I think she thought he couldn’t be any worse than our parents. He was so much worse. She loved him. She was so stupid._

What happened to him?

 _He’s dead_.)

.

.

( _It was an ugly death._ )

.

.

‘How did you get into dreamshare?’

For a few seconds Ariadne worries Arthur’s going to ignore the question entirely.

(It wouldn’t be the first time.)

She’s surprised, though. He answers almost without moving his lips, and the answer is abrupt and intruding. Like a cough of dust in the air.

‘Cobb.’

‘I _guessed_ that,’ Ariadne mutters, like she’d been hoping for juicy details, like she’d been expecting to find out he’s secretly Mal’s adopted brother and he was a criminal by the age of sixteen.

There’s nothing secret about it.

It happens like this:

Arthur gets a scholarship to UCLA, leaves his father and his sister and the grave of his mother in New Jersey.

Two years later he takes an elective course in the psychology of lucid dreaming and he meets Dominick Cobb, who might be a genius even though he’s not _that_ much older than Arthur himself.

At the end of the semester, Dom shares the real secret of the PASIV. Arthur dreams for two minutes, and then Arthur drops everything in the name of dreaming more.

‘But it was legit?’ Ariadne asks, now, baffled apparently by the notion that Arthur was once a tax paying, law abiding citizen.

(Ok, so he’s still a tax paying citizen in three countries, but only because it fleshes out false identities better.)

‘Of course.’ Arthur does his best not to sound too ruffled. ‘Dom and Mal were funded by the military as researchers.’

‘So the extraction jobs. That was only after Mal was dead?’

Arthur doesn’t flinch, but it’s a near thing.

‘Not exactly,’ he replies, in a tone of such finality he couldn’t have closed the subject any better if he’d left the room.

Ariadne watches him, wonders what he regrets, besides the one glaringly obvious truth. She wishes she had it in her to ask how he found Eames.

She knows the answers will disappoint her. And somehow she knows Arthur would answer, if she asked.

And really, that’s enough for her.

Enough for now, at least.

.

.

Eames, will you just shut up for one goddamn minute of your life?

_Very well._

No. Eames, don’t. I didn’t – Eames. Come on. I’m sorry. Eames. I’m sorry, ok? Please. Will you look at me? I’m sorry. Thank you. Eames.

.

.

Arthur dreams.

For the first time in years he dreams a rich, full, natural dream.

It comes without warning, without ceremony, untriggered.

He dreams he’s on the bank of a lazy river, so deep it shimmers violet in the sunlight. He can smell pine, but there isn’t a tree in sight, just endless desert, cut through by a winding river like a lonely crack in a sheer pane of glass.

‘Arthur,’ says a voice.

A friendly voice. The voice of unconditional love. The voice that sounds like thick snow and forgiveness.

‘Mom?’ he says, his own voice cracking, and he turns around, away from the river.

She’s standing barefoot in the scorching sand, unburned, teased by a breeze. The neat hem of her blue summer dress flaps above her knobbly kneecaps, and her dark hair falls around her slender shoulders.

She hasn’t aged a day, not since he was eleven years old, and he was pulled out of Mr Rogers’ class and told _sorry, so sorry, but there’s been a terrible accident_.

‘Arthur,’ his mother says again, as if it were the name she gave him, and not one he stole from her to forge himself a criminal identity.

‘Why are you calling me that?’ he asks.

He wants to hear his name, his _real_ name, on her lips. The name she said like nobody else, because he belonged to her. He was all hers, the way his father and sister never understood.

‘It’s who you are,’ Caroline Arthur replies, and maybe Arthur should feel relieved, accepted.

Instead his heart shatters into a hundred thousand shards, shredding his insides to ribbons until his chest is a sagging sack of blood.

‘No, it’s not,’ he pleads, shaking his head. ‘It’s not. Mom, it’s me. It’s Daniel. It’s me. Your Daniel.’

‘Arthur,’ she says again, reaching out to him with both arms.

There’s sand in her hair.

She’s crying.

Arthur is rooted to the spot. Behind him the river hisses and grumbles, and the sand is loud with his secrets.

‘I’m sorry,’ Arthur cries out, full of a guilt that doesn’t belong to him, of anger he hasn’t felt since he was a teenager.

‘Arthur?’

He doesn’t know the second voice. A woman’s as well, silky and wretchedly tempting.

He doesn’t want to take his eyes off his crying mother but his feet move and all too soon he’s turned away, and is staring across the violet water to the other side of the river where a young woman waves solemnly at him, dressed in one of his mother’s dresses.

She’s blonde and not very tall. Her eyes are very big, her lips very full, and she’s not crying but she looks awfully sad nonetheless.

He knows this face, despite never seeing it before, not even a photo.

She’s real, pieced together by his subconscious, the hidden imagination. The feminine charm of handsomeness, the stockiness melted into curves, the Cambridge accent unhardened by London and lies.

‘Emmeline,’ Arthur whispers, but she hears him anyway.

She smiles, so bright it’s as if she’s transformed into sunlight, and it’s a pretty lie that Arthur soaks up like a starving tree.

The river roars, and the sun whines.

Arthur wakes.

He wakes unexpectedly, soaked with sweat and shivering.

He gasps a lungful of air and squeezes it tight in his heaving chest, lies totally still and clutches the sheets tight.

‘You ok?’ a voice asks, muffled with lingering sleep.

Thomas is lying on his side, the wide expanse of his bare back turned to Arthur. He waits patiently for a reply without looking around.

His dark hair looks almost red in the streak of light that leaks in through the curtains from the street lamp.

‘Dream,’ Arthur says, half in wonder, the edges of his vision fuzzy, and Thomas turns. His cheeks are pink, and he’s very warm when he shuffles closer, the shadow of stubble dark on his jaw, his eyes glinting whitish blue.

‘An actual dream?’ Thomas asks, hoarse with curiosity.

He sounds almost worried, and Arthur keeps from rolling his eyes.

‘Yeah,’ he replies through gritted teeth.

‘But, how?’

‘I don’t fucking know,’ Arthur snaps.

The tiny seed of joy hidden in his chest has vanished, leaving him frightened and angry, and what kind of a dumbass is he sleeping with, asking questions like that?

Thomas at least seems aware of his faux pas, because he keeps quiet in the face of Arthur’s frustration.

Arthur throws the covers off with a scowl.

‘I’m going out,’ he mutters, and heads for the shower.

He locks the door behind him with a snap.

Thomas doesn’t point out it’s almost quarter to three in the morning.

With any luck, he’ll be gone before Arthur finishes his shower.

He wouldn’t be the first, and there’s plenty more where he came from. He’s not a very good architect anyway. Imaginative, but not clever enough to make the most of it.

Arthur washes the memory of him away, scrubs him out of his skin with blunt fingernails and soap.

He keeps hold of every last detail of the dream in his mind, as if it’s his only hope.

.

.

(It might be.)

.

.

**Author's Note:**

> Title taken from: His glory, by which whose might all things are moved, pierces the universe, and in one part sheds more resplendence, elsewhere less. ~ Dante, Paradiso
> 
> GLORY is that bright tragic thing, that for an instant means Dominion, warms some poor name that never felt the sun, gently replacing in oblivion. ~ Emily Dickinson


End file.
